G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

FDR’s death left the presidency to Harry Truman, a mostly unknown Missouri politician who had attacked Hoover and the FBI for their infringements on civil liberties, although Truman may have been retaliating for federal charges against his old Kanas City party boss, Tom Pendergast. Hoover wanted the FBI to house a permanent and worldwide intelligence agency, while “Wild Bill” Donovan competed for his own Office of Strategic Services to win the same role. Hoover despised Donovan as a reckless administrator whose wartime connections with Soviet agents in Europe made him soft on communism. The FBI’s network in Latin America had surveilled Nazi smuggling and other efforts, but their significance paled in comparison to the SS’s war waged behind Nazi lines. While Roosevelt was alive, an investigation favored the FBI as better organized and less susceptible to abuses, but Truman came in with no preexisting knowledge of the debate, and so Hoover worked to ingratiate himself with the new president as he had several times before. When the war ended in August 1945, Hoover laid the groundwork for another public-relations blitz to celebrate the bureau’s wartime accomplishments, and Truman made the promising move of disbanding the OSS on October 1. But rather than tap the FBI for global intelligence, Truman initially looked to the military services to form a Central Intelligence Group, while the FBI restricted its activities to within the country.